The present invention relates to data validation, and more specifically, to providing data validation as a service.
Advancements in analytics and optimization solutions to perform simulation, prediction, gap analysis, risk assessment, reporting, and other activities, assist organizations in making well-informed and timely decisions. Such analysis relies on the presence of correct data as input to provide any realistic solution.
In large organizations, different data may be owned by different competencies. For example, Human Resources may own and maintain all employee data, whereas Payroll may be responsible for the financial data for each employee. Typically, the data is maintained in the format that best suits the data owners. Each system may have its own schema, format, access methods, and underlying technologies (e.g., DB2™ Oracle™, Excel™). The choice can be influenced by the skill availabilities of the data managers or may be influenced by existing legacy formats. For such disparate systems, simple database principles such as referential integrity cannot be enforced, even if the underlying technology is the same. For different technologies, the issues can become difficult to manage.
Data validation is typically not performed frequently. For example, most organizations perform such tests about once per day during a low activity period to flag all inconsistencies. Towards this end, many organizations typically either chose to develop the code base to perform data validation or adopt an existing industrial tool. However, developing the code base by an organization can be expensive, and existing tools on the market may not be designed to handle some of the unique validation checks required by an organization.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to provide data validation to various organizations as a service offering.